Organization Management Software: Automating the flow of work across the business

Organization Management Software (OMS) is a new category of business software that combines Workflow Automation with Resource Management for significantly improved business performance. Workflow automation allows companies to streamline any business process by providing all necessary information to process participants, such as documents, links, and contracts. Enterprise resource management (ERM) enables companies to integrate any company resource, such as laptops or external agencies, into a workflow, for example automating contract renewals. 

By combining these two technologies into a single solution, businesses can organize work more efficiently and eliminate silos across the business.

Resource Management is a new Flowers module that greatly enhances the capabilities of our Workflow Engine.  It’s basically a database of company resources that can be accessed from our Workflow Engine.  Resource Management is conceptually similar to managing company resources in Excel spreadsheets but when you combine it with Workflow Automation it’s far more powerful than working with Excel. 

It’s actually very easy. You can define any company resource as Objects and group them in a List.  A List can contain as many Objects as you need, and you can create as many lists as you want for any company resource you want to store in Flowers - contracts, laptops, buildings, equipment, suppliers, etc. These can then be accessed directly in any workflow process.  

An Object can be a document that includes data like renewal date, consolation, amount, responsibility, accounting, etc.  Whatever you need to track.  You can also define Sections, and use these for permissions. Each section can contain as many attributes as you want when you set up an Object such as date, yes/no, checkbox, etc., and each attribute can be set up as required or non-required. It’s very flexible - you can define exactly what you need.

A very simple example is contract renewals, which is a time-consuming manual task at many companies.  In Flowers you would simply define an Object ‘Contract’ with the supporting data you need to track (Contract ID, start and end dates, etc.), then create a ‘Contracts’ List.  Once you’ve set up your contracts as a company resource, you can define a Workflow ‘Renew Contracts’ that checks each contract and either renews automatically, or notifies a decision maker, or updates the contract, or takes whatever action is appropriate.  

It’s all seamlessly integrated because it’s one solution, and integrating Resource Management with Workflow Automation takes the guesswork - and a lot of the repetitive manual work - out of managing company resources.

Most companies spend a lot of time managing core data and this effort can be minimized by automating how the data is managed, while at the same time improving accuracy and visibility.  Our Workflow Engine can fetch information from the database in any format and add, manage, or change the data in workflow. If you think about all the ways in which a company’s core data needs to be kept up to date - expirations, renewals, changes, etc. - you can imagine the benefits of a solution that continuously monitors that data looking for trigger events like ‘renewal date’, and then taking appropriate action to either update the data or assign someone to look at it.

Flowers’ Organization Management Software lets you define any type of company resource with flexible rules combined with a powerful workflow engine that continuously monitors for any change or trigger, like renewal dates, goods received, invoice amount discrepancies, or simply time-based like every two weeks.  For example, you can define a trigger like a Controller approval if the net amount is bigger than the budget, or check for certification renewals every year and follow up by inviting people to schedule their next training.  

Flowers’ Organization Management Software is so flexible it can be used to manage a facility or a fleet of vehicles, automatically renew contracts or certificates, approve purchase or maintenance requests, manage time and expenses, ensure company property is appropriately allocated and returned… The possibilities are endless, as virtually any process can be automated, with or without manual intervention.

Actually, I don’t think flexibility and saving time are the biggest benefits.  The real benefit is turning your data into SMART DATA.  

When you define company resources as Objects in Flowers, you’re enriching your data in a way that can be monitored, accessed, and correctly understood by the Workflow Engine.  We use matrix sortation to see the data from all perspectives at once: If you search for creditors, you can see all the parameters for creditors.

In the past you’d have to manually create folders in file systems for contracts, creditors, debtors, department purchasing, etc.  By defining objects with attributes it becomes self-organizing and can be searched based on any attribute so don’t have to set up cumbersome file structures to find information or trigger actions. 

It’s a game changer.  Once your data becomes smart data instead of being stuck in documents in folders in file systems, anything is possible.

That’s no problem as our security is as granular as you need it with deep permission control per List, Object, or Section. You can grant block permissions for Objects or Lists, or define Sections that different departments or individuals can access such as payment terms in a contract, etc.  

For example, you can set it up so everyone in the company can access all contracts but only accounting can see the payment terms, or you can create public and private Sections for personal information and give HR permission to view all information but others in the company can only see the public information. Those are just a couple of examples of how you can use Sections to secure Object data as granularly as you need to.

Honestly I’m not sure where the limits are.  Our customers keep surprising us with the things they do with our software because you can define as many process steps, lists, validations, steps, objects, triggers, etc., as you need to seamlessly automate work. The use cases are virtually limitless, everything from inventory to asset management to logistics.

Ah, now that is very exciting! Our solution is so flexible that our customers and partners will be able to use it to build their own solutions quickly and easily, so we expect some interesting developments in that space. And even more exciting, customers will be able to use their smart data for data mining to help them continuously improve efficiency, avoid costly delays and oversights, and optimize operations. So watch this space!